Female authors dominate Miles Franklin longlist

Updated
Tue 26 Mar 2013, 11:39 AM AEDT

Female authors have dominated the longlist for this year's Miles Franklin literary award, earning eight of the 10 nominations.

Romy Ash, Lily Brett, Michelle de Kretser, Annah Faulkner, Drusilla Modjeska, ML Stedman, Carrie Tiffany and Jacqueline Wright make up the female contingent, the biggest representation since the longlist was first introduced in 2005.

The list, whittled down from 73 nominations, includes five first-time novelists and four previously shortlisted authors.

Simon Lewis from the Miles Franklin Trust says it is wonderful to see five debut authors - Ash, Faulkner, Modjeska, Stedman and Wright - enter the longlist.

"We're delighted, I think it shows the strength of novel-writing at the moment and obviously great interests in getting these novelists up for awards such as this to provide important support in the state of their career," he said.

Judging panellist Richard Neville, from the State Library of New South Wales, said this year was "one of the highest number of entries indicating the robust strength of new fiction".

"These range from conventional to multiple narratives, with settings as diverse as a lonely lighthouse, battlefield hospitals on the Western Front, colonial Papua New Guinea, the dusty outback and the inner city," he said in a statement.

"The list provides a feast of reading, including close encounters with a polio-stricken girl determined to be an artist, a young boy kidnapped by his runaway mother, an unexpected shipwreck adoption, a family of kookaburras, a rock journalist and a famously shambolic poet."

Murray Waldren, a journalist with The Australian, Sydney-based bookseller Anna Low, Queensland Writers Centre founder Craig Munro and Flinders University Adjunct Professor Susan Sheridan made up the remainder of the judging panel.

The 10 nominations will be narrowed down at a public event at the State Library of NSW on April 30.

The winner will be announced in Canberra on June 19 and will take home $60,000 in prize money.